bitcoiner - Witness Update #11 - 2016-12-02steemCreated with Sketch.

Welcome to my weekly witness update. This is something I do every Friday as some other witnesses do too. Hopefully, this will keep my followers and the community up-to-date with what I've been up to. Ultimately, I hope I may gain your witness approval vote.

The template used here was devised by @jesta. And as always for witness update posts, I will use the Power Up 100% option (which you can now see visually marked!).

1. Accomplished the week of 2016-12-02

Upgraded my servers to the final 0.16.0 release candidate 4. See the post Technical Update: Steem 0.16.0 (RC4) is Available for Audit and Upgrading for more information. These include my primary dedicated witness node, my backup witness node, and my public full seed/api node. In contrast to the last hardfork, the new usage of chainbase lets the RAM usage be significantly lower than ever. There are other considerations to keep in mind when deploying this new steemd, which after a lot of experimentation on my part, I believe I have a good grasp of all the idiosyncrasies.

Started learning the steemd codebase. I have successfully gotten to the point where I can make a code change to an API call, rebuild steemd, and relaunch steemd to test my changes. As there is a lot of usage of Boost functions and C++ in general in chainbase and steemd, I've been reviewing those topics, such as multi_index containers. It's quite a different perspective to be exploring how the blockchain backend works, versus just deploying the binaries as a witness or interacting with a running node through a frontend client (or even coding such a client). There is indeed a lot of code behind-the-scenes powering it all!

2. Upcoming projects/goals

Continue to spend time on the Steemit.com codebase and Steem codebase.

Continue with @timcliff's wish list and trying to implement some of the items there.

Continue being active on Steemit, Steemit Chat, and GitHub.

3. Thoughts from this week

This week we saw new additions and fixes to the Steemit.com site. We now have a more customizable profile, views counter, full power badge, and order balances in the wallet. See the post Steemit.com UI Release 0.1.161202 for more information.

We are getting much closer to the hardfork taking into effect. A lot of witnesses have already upgraded to it! The price of STEEM has been going up, perhaps in anticipation of the economic changes.

There have been many posts about spreading the word of Steemit to everyone outside. This is great for adoption.

There are also many giveaways and contests. As it is December, I have seen a few advent calendars too.

Finally, thanks to everyone who have voted for me as witness. I am currently at 42! Thanks to all who support me and like what I do. It is all very much appreciated!

That's awesome that you are getting into the Steem blockchain code! With the ability to do that plus Steemit.com changes, I'll bet you can make some pretty cool enhancements. I look forward to seeing what you do!

This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the first half of Dec 03. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $11.11 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.